Lewis Hyde’s The
Gift has indeed acted a real trigger to some delightful contemplation into his edition of
Thoreau’s essays, which formed a passing reference on our previous post!
Well, this post seeks to throw added light on
some of the salient snippets from Thoreau’s essays, culled out from this amazing Lewis
Hyde Edition! Interestingly, this edition also contains his all-time popular
essay on ‘Civil Disobedience’ as well! And as always, without a doubt, each of
the essays is for sure a delectable treat in itself!
As we all know, the naturalist Thoreau was quite
in high renown for his simple living and high thinking!
I guess, Thoreau musta really been one of those rare-o-rare
few who knew for certain, the meaning of the Heideggerian ‘dwelling’ in all its
grandeur!
On this post, herein below, I’m so prompted and
tempted beyond measure to give y’all just two precious, and profound snippets
from Thoreau’s works!
While the first snippet on walking is from The Essays
of Henry D Thoreau edited by Lewis Hyde, the second snippet on reading
is from Thoreau’s Walden.
Firstly,
from his endearing take on Walking!
Thoreau on Walking -
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute
freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to
regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a
member of society.
I have met with but one or two persons in the
course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking
walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully
derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and
asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land,
till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a
Holy-Lander.
They who never go to the Holy Land in their
walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do
go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.
Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home,
which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but
equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.
He who sits still in a house all the time may be
the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more
vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking
the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the
most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade!
It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders,
even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending
enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to
the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our
steps.
We should go forth on the shortest walk,
perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to
send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are
ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and
friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your
will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for
a walk.
Secondly,
for his enlightening take on Reading!
Thoreau
speaks -
My residence was more favorable, not only to
thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the
range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the
influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were
first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen
paper.
Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, "Being
seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this
advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have
experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric
doctrines."
I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page
only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house
to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet
I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two
shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made
me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
It is worth the expense of youthful days and
costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are
raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and
provocations.
It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and
repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the
study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies;
but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language
they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics
but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
To read well, that is, to read true books in a
true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than
any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such
as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to
this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were
written.
However much we may admire the orator's
occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far
behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is
behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The
astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like
our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum
is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the
inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those
who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and
who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator,
speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can
understand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with
him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of
relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than
any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.
It may be translated into every language, and
not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;--not be represented
on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech.
Two thousand summers have imparted to the
monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and
autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere
into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and
the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best,
stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.
They have no cause of their own to plead, but
while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse
them.
Their authors are a natural and irresistible
aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence
on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise
and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles
of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but
yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the
imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches,
and further proves his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his
children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it
is that he becomes the founder of a family.
The best books are not read even by those who are
called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this
town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books
even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.
Even the college-bred and so-called liberally
educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the
English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient
classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there
are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them.
I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a
French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to "keep
himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him
what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this,
to keep up and add to his English.
This is about as much as the collegebred
generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose.
One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will
find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from
reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar
even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but
must keep silence about it.
Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our
colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has
proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet,
and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader;
How many a man has dated a new era in his life
from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will
explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we
may find somewhere uttered.
These same questions that disturb and puzzle and
confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been
omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and
his life.
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed
beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not
afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the
head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my
accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a
revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and
stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house,
until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's
wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.
I grew in those seasons like corn in the night,
and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were
not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual
allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking
of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went.
The day advanced as if to light some work of
mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is
accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant
good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my
door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my
nest.
This was sheer idleness to my fellowtownsmen, no
doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not
have been found wanting.
A man must find his occasions in himself, it is
true.
The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
reprove his indolence.
To be contd…
images: amazondotcom
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